Book: Axel's Castle

This book sat on my shelf for 18 years before I finally read it.
(Had been a roommate's I think.) Coming to it now, I was voracious
for it. It's made me realize how scattershot my knowledge of
developments in literature really has been, despite the much vaunted
English major at Yale. Granted, this study is really comparative lit,
yet I'd never HEARD of the school of Symbolism, for instance and its
real role as the handmaiden of Modernism (the latter term Wilson
never uses; don't know whether Joyce, Proust, Stein etc were even
being called modernist in 1930, when it was written). In any case,
fascinating on Eliot, Yeats, Proust and Joyce. Each essay made me
want to pick up the originals again and delve. I think it has me
fired up to re-read Swann's Way in a new translation and likely go
beyond it.

Interesting structure in the way that Wilson sort of limns Symbolism
and its exponents at the beginning, but really much more effectively
defines at the end of the book after having adduced these examples of
its heirs. Just as Romanticism was a reaction against Classicism,
and Naturalism a reaction against Romanticism, Symbolism sort of
subsumed Naturalism and Romanticism both. He talks about Joyce's
excruciating attention to the details of human behaviour and cultural
life, a Naturalist obsession, yet with the kind of lambent,
suggestive and highly idiosyncratic method of telling, a kind of
multi-valent perspective relentlessly at work. With Proust he
focuses among other things on his unconcern with naturalistic
exigencies on the one hand, the kind of dream logic plan of the
work. The symbolist thing that Wilson emphasizes in conclusion seems
to be universally escapist. On the one hand a way out of the
objective mechanistic shortcomings of say, Zola or even Flaubert, to
waken us to the possibilities of consciousness; on the other hand--
and here a marked departure from Romanticism--an absolute refusal to
engage the actual world, to affect it, but rather to construct an
alternative to it, so rigorously constructed and rich as to be an
alternative world. The title comes to Villiers D'Adams' "Axel" whose
castle really represents this rarefied alternative to having to
live. A tendency which filtered down or was echoed in Mallarme,
Valery etc, whose concerns were the periphery of consciousness as
access to the quick of things, or in the latter a renunciation of
content for process--kind zen-like it seems or Buddhistic in its need
to empty. The other option, that of Rimbaud, was literally escapist,
and in his case from literature itself, and escape into the real
world, from which he cultivated nonetheless some hermetic resistance
all the same. Gertrude Stein whittling down language to a
distillation of something overlooked or unexplored, which seems to
have nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of language, which is
communication, something like private totem or sensation freed from
history and meaning. These are just gluey ramblings to help me
remember, rattled off quickly with Sevi begging to type, so wrapping
it up